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A Historian of Culture Looks at Contemporary India
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different aspects or dimensions of a single unified entity. "Culture is the social expression of value seeking and history is its process". "Human history must in effect aspire after being a spiritual autobiography of man, a discovery of lost times' which is simultaneously a creative transformation of present, a discovery of what is hidden in the past experiences of the soul"
The pursuit of material ends alone does not reflect the whole of human aspirations and man's quest for fulfillment. Want and interest represent the physical and biological needs of men; these by themselves are incapable of expressing the deeper human urges that spring from the core of their being. These urges are the hunger of the soul for surmounting the limitedness of the temporal life: the hunger for immortality (Amritattva). These aspirations are in reality transcendental in nature. Every human being, in the deepest layer of his/her aspirations, thirsts for the envisioning of and the attaining of a life without the afflictions of limitations.
The vision of this life without afflictions of limitations is the philosophy of life, the Philosophia Perennis which creates and sustains a society. Philosophia perennis is also the fountainhead from which culture flows. This philosophy is truly universal, for it is a philosophy for the entire mankind and is not inhibited by the time-space differentials within human affairs. It is, therefore, sanātana. It is also universal in the sense that it gets articulated in every society. And as it is sanātāna, it is also Transcendental. Now, since culture is located within human affairs and since it is at the same time transcendental in nature, the starting point of culture and its course has to be charted from the transcendental into the human. This transmission of a thing that is essentially trans-human to begin with from the transcendental plane to the plane of culture is comparable to the descent of Ganga to the earth. The transmission is effected through the mediatioin of extra-ordinary human agents, i.e., prophets, saints etc.
Philosophia perennis is based on the spiritual-mystical apprehension of the Absolute by some specially endowed individuals; it is the articulation of the envisioned truth in human vocabulary and idiom. This articulation of the truth automatically, almost inevitably, gets conditioned by space and time factors. Thus in its expressive mode and in its communication profile, the articulation of envisioned truth acquires a local and social countenance. While the articulation of the truth envisioned takes on a symbolical form, it lays a great deal of emphasis on praxis which lends itself to exposition in clearer terms than the experience of the envisioning of the truth itself. This leads to the growth of the tradition (the vidyā, the amnāya, the āgama). The seeds of the sprouting of diverse cultures lie here.
The tradition grows both in its corpus of exposition as well as in its acquisition of a body of followers. All these three—the envisioning of the truth by the finely tuned seeker, the exposition of the truth and its praxis, and the acquisition of a body of followers result from the perennial yearning of the soul for transcendence providing them the common ground for coalescence. And these three in their cumulative effect give a society its distinctive personality, its weltanschauung, a matrix of values. This Weltanschauung derives or constitutes itself from a vision of cosmology that endows life with meaning and goal in the most fundamental way. Thus, it becomes both the repository and the standard of value. The formation of the weltanschauung, however, does not take place in logical formal manner and is, therefore, not reducible to logical formal categories. But on that score alone it does not deserve to be either set aside as something opaque or dismissed as fevered imagination. The value of the visitation of grand vision beyond the idiom of logic and analysis suffusing the perception with an extraordinary and ineffable light has not only been attested to by spiritual seekers and mystics but also by creative artists and even scientists.
